MACKINAC ISLAND — I'm up here on Mackinac Island, at the Detroit Regional Chamber's annual policy conference, and civility, again, has taken the main stage.

And I've got to be honest: I'm not feeling very civil about civility.

It is, indirectly, one of the chamber's conference "pillars" (a subhead, Chamber President and CEO Sandy Baruah says, of "trust"). In his final keynote speech at the conference, Gov. Rick Snyder, who presides over a state that contains Detroit Public Schools Community District, the ongoing Flint water crisis and the unemployment insurance crisis in which thousands of Michiganders were falsely accused of committing fraud, called a lack of civility his greatest concern for America right now, which is kind of a jaw-dropping statement.

As a tool, civility has value. As a goal? It's lipstick on a pig.

I want Americans to be able to discuss hard subjects and find common ground without calling each other mean names. Civility is required for that.

But I'm skeptical: too often, a claim of incivility is a means of control, a new kind of respectability politics that allows the listener to disregard some arguments, not on the merits, but because of how the argument is made.

Take, for instance, the opposition to the NFL protests. Some Americans simply refuse to engage with the substance of the protests — players who take a knee during the national anthem hoped to draw attention to the ways in which law enforcement harms people of color — because they've deemed the manner of protest disrespectful.

They invoke the same excuse to dismiss students staging school walkouts to protest gun violence. And when Wayne County Executive Warren Evans' responded to a moderator's question by affirming that yes, race is part of our region's difficulties with mass transit critics charged that Evans was attempting to inject race into the subject, nimbly avoiding the question itself.

A plea for civility can camouflage a distaste for uncomfortable truths, a hallmark of that bygone era when people were nicer, and some were forced to had to sit down and shut up because of who they were, not what they had to say.

NEWSLETTERS

Get the Field Notes newsletter delivered to your inbox

We're sorry, but something went wrong

A weekly newsletter from The Ideas Lab focused on responses to community problems

And really, if your objective is to to strip healthcare from the state's most vulnerable, systemically neglect the state's largest school district, maintain a dysfunctional status quo that keeps people who need jobs from the places where jobs are, and pollute our air and water, does it really matter if you're nice about it?

"Ideally, you want people who can reach across the aisle because they can have actual conversations," said Dana Nessel, the attorney general candidate who is the first openly gay candidate to seek statewide office. "If you can recognize that a political opponent is a human being, it makes it easier to have a fruitful discussion about policy."

But detached from empathy, civility is nothing but lip service.

"I used to do these debates on 'Let It Rip' with (state Rep.) Gary Glenn (then head of the rabidly anti-LGBT American Family Association), and he was such a gentleman as he was disparaging me as a human being, communicating that I was a lesser form of human so my family deserved significantly less rights than his," Nessel said. . "You can have such a complete lack of respect for a person based on who they are as a human being, it doesn't matter if you put a pretty face on it."

Civility is meant to be a framework, says Tonya Allen, president of the Detroit-based Skillman Foundation. Defining the rules of engagement for a conversation should be where the work starts, not where it ends, and it should never be used to silence opposing views.

"I'm exhausted with us being polite," Allen said. "I'm exhausted with everyone not talking about problems."

And it is important to understand who is expected to be civil, and whose uncivil behavior is yet tolerated.

Civility, says Anika Goss-Foster of Detroit Future City, often seems to mean "I'm expected to be tolerant of things I am not able to be tolerant of."

And sometimes, she said, "Me being civil is me being quiet when I'm being talked over.”

But if civility is a tool, if it is attached to empathy and respect, it can create space for productivity and collaboration.

Ferndale City Council member Melanie Piana says she and her colleagues became more effective after they adopted a few informal rules for how they'd treat each other: No one gossips about other council members. There's no punitive blame-placing for failed ideas or unintentional errors.

“A basic thing is active listening,” Piana said. “We’re so quick to disregard what someone has to say, to get in our own opinion. We’re not digesting what the other person has to say.”

Passion, says Kelly Rossman, former CEO of Truscott Rossman and now a candidate for state Senate, should be an inherent part of politics.

“I expect to be passionate about the issues I am passionate about,” Rossman said. “But I can still find compromise and the best solution for the greater good.”

When I circulated around this conference, telling folks I wanted to talk to them about why I'm not always keen on civility, I got one of two responses: Immediate recognition and agreement, or bafflement that came just as quickly.

The plea for a return to civility, for a lot of folks, is tied to President Donald Trump, for whom incivility is a personal calling card and who swept into office on a wave of white anger.

But anger isn't inherently destructive. A person who is angry is telling you something important about her life. And some things — the poisoning of a city's water, for instance, or decades of disinvestment in the state's largest school district — are still worth getting angry about.